Highly porous carbon has played an important role in tackling down the energy and environmental problems due to their attractive features such as high specific surface area (SSA), stability, and mass productivity. Especially, the desirable characteristics of the highly porous carbon such as lightweight, fast adsorption/desorption kinetics, and high SSA have attracted extensive attention in the "hydrogen storage" application which is a main bottleneck for the realization of on-board hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. We herein presented porous carbon with hierarchical pore structure derived from highly crystalline metal organic frameworks (denoted as MOF-derived carbon: MDC) without any carbon source and showed it as a promising hydrogen storage adsorbent. MDCs can be fabricated by a simple heat adjustment of MOFs without complicated process and environmental burden. The MDC displayed hierarchical pore structures with high ultramicroporosity, high SSA, and very high total pore volume. Due to its exceptional porosity, MDCs exhibited reversible H 2 storage capacities at certain conditions that were better than those of previously reported porous carbons and MOFs.

A controlled assembly and alignment of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) in a high-packing density with a scalable way remains challenging. This paper focuses on the preparation of self-assembled and well-aligned CNTs with a densely packed nanostructure in the form of buckypaper via a simple filtration method. The CNT suspension concentration is strongly reflected in the alignment and assembly behavior of CNT buckypaper. We further demonstrated that the horizontally aligned CNT domain gradually increases in size when increasing the deposited CNT quantity. The resultant aligned buckypaper exhibited notably enhanced packing density, strength, modulus, and hardness compared to previously reported buckypapers.

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Graphene oxide (GO) was recently reported to assemble into one-dimensional fiber precursors that can be used to produce next-generation multifunctional graphene-based materials. This study describes the facile fabrication of GO fibers with excellent mechanical properties, utilizing a diamine cross-linker that forms ion bridges between the GO layers. Organic co-coagulants and postdrawing processes, which are usually employed in typical GO spinning processes, were not used here. The GO layers readily aligned along the spinning axis, and the GO formed closely packed structures in the fibers. The fibers displayed a Young’s modulus of 26.6 GPa and a maximal tensile strength of 384.3 MPa. The interlayer microstructure of the GO sheets could be tuned by modifying the structures of the cross-linking diamine groups, yielding a range of mechanical properties. These observations suggested that our newly developed GO fiber synthesis method could allow applications of graphene-based fibrous materials through GO surface chemistry modification approaches.